Union with Christ

Open any of Paul's letters at random and you will meet it within a few verses. In Christ. In Christ Jesus. In him. In whom. In the Lord. Counts vary with what the counter includes, and the figure most often quoted goes back to Adolf Deissmann's 1892 study of the formula, which put the occurrences in the Pauline letters at one hundred and sixty-four. Whatever the exact number, the order of magnitude is the point. Paul uses this way of speaking far more often than he uses the language of justification, of adoption, of reconciliation or of forgiveness. If frequency of use told us where a writer's centre lay, the argument would be over.

Frequency does not by itself settle anything, and it is worth saying so before the argument runs away. A writer may repeat a phrase because it is a convenient shorthand rather than because it carries his theology. What makes the case more than a word count is what the phrase is doing. Look at where the benefits are located. Election is 'in Him' at Ephesians 1:4. Redemption and forgiveness are 'in Him' at Ephesians 1:7. There is no condemnation 'for those who are in Christ Jesus' at Romans 8:1. A person is a new creation 'if anyone is in Christ' at 2 Corinthians 5:17. Righteousness is had 'in Him' at 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Philippians 3:9. And 1 Corinthians 1:30 says, 'It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God: our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.' Paul does not list the benefits and then mention that they come through Christ. He puts them inside him.

The modern study that most readers are pointed to is Constantine Campbell's Paul and Union with Christ, published in 2012, which works through every occurrence of the relevant constructions rather than arguing from a slogan: en Christo and its variants, eis Christon, syn Christo, dia Christou, and the compound verbs prefixed with syn. Campbell's conclusion is that no single English word will do the work, and he proposes keeping four at once. Union names the covenant bond and the mutual indwelling. Participation names sharing in Christ's death and resurrection. Identification names being located in his realm and under his lordship. Incorporation names membership in the body. A reader who collapses all four into a warm feeling of closeness to Jesus has lost most of what the texts say.

The category had a rough twentieth century, and the history explains why it is often missing from the textbooks. Albert Schweitzer, in The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, published in German in 1930, argued that being in Christ was the main crater of Paul's thought and that justification by faith was a subsidiary crater formed inside it, useful for the controversy with the Judaisers and not much more. That was an attack on the Reformation's centre of gravity, and it was taken as one. E. P. Sanders, arguing in 1977 that Paul's real pattern of religion was a participationist eschatology rather than a doctrine of how an individual gets right with God, pressed in the same direction from a different starting point. The effect on conservative Protestant writing was defensive: participation language came to smell of liberalism, and the safest course seemed to be to keep the forensic categories in the centre and give union a respectful paragraph. That is why the most used category in Paul is often the thinnest chapter in the systematics, and it is a reaction to a nineteenth and twentieth century argument rather than a judgement about the text.

Romans 6 is where the category stops being a manner of speaking. Paul has just written that where sin increased, grace increased all the more, and the obvious objection arrives: shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? His answer does not appeal to gratitude, to consequences, or to the law. It appeals to something that has already happened to the reader. 'Or aren't you aware that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with Him like this in His death, we will certainly also be united with Him in His resurrection.'

Notice the structure of the argument. Paul does not say that a Christian should die to sin. He says a Christian has died, and that going on in sin is therefore not wicked so much as incoherent, like a widow keeping her husband's dinner warm. The verbs are past and they are passive: you were baptized, you were buried, your old self was crucified. Then at verse 11 comes the single imperative that governs the rest: 'So you too must count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.' The command is to reckon a fact, not to manufacture one. Only after that do the commands about conduct begin at verse 12, and they are grounded on the reckoning.

What the passage says about baptism is disputed, and the disputes run on two levels rather than one. Start with the prior question, which is often skipped. Most readers take Paul to be speaking of water baptism, because he expects the reference to settle an argument and his readers had all been through the rite. A real minority reads 'baptized into Christ Jesus' as baptism in or by the Spirit, on the analogy of 1 Corinthians 12:13, where all were baptized in one Spirit into one body; the reading is held by a number of Baptist and Brethren interpreters and by some Pentecostal writers, and its case is that Paul's argument needs the reality and not the rite, that nothing in Romans 6 mentions water, and that Galatians 3:27 and 1 Corinthians 12:13 give him the vocabulary for a Spirit-wrought incorporation. Its difficulty is that the verb baptizo would then be doing metaphorical work in a sentence introduced by 'aren't you aware', which usually appeals to something the readers had visibly undergone. What both sides agree on is that the thing signified is union with Christ in his death and resurrection. What follows takes the water reading, because that is where most of the historic disagreement lies, and that disagreement is about the relation between the sign and the thing. Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican readings hold that baptism is the instrument through which God effects what it signifies, so that Paul can say what he says without qualification; Lutherans in particular will not let the sentence be softened, and Luther's counsel to a despairing believer was not to examine his heart but to remember that he had been baptized. Reformed readings hold that the sacrament is a true means of grace whose efficacy is not tied to the moment of administration, so that the thing signified is conferred in God's timing to those to whom it belongs. Baptist and Anabaptist readings hold that baptism follows faith and portrays a union already given, and press that Paul is addressing a church of professing believers in which the two coincided. None of these is a way of getting out of what verse 3 says. They are different accounts of how the sign and the reality are joined, and the argument is old enough that you should assume the other positions have heard your objection.

One more thing the chapter establishes, because it will matter in the next lesson and the one after. The death and resurrection of Christ are not, in Paul's account, merely events that produce a benefit which is then handed to us. They are events we are put inside. The believer's newness of life is not a second thing caused by the resurrection; it is participation in that resurrection. This is why the syn compounds pile up as they do, and why Paul can tell the Colossians that their life is already hidden with Christ in God while they are still visibly alive in Colossae. Hold that thought against the way salvation is often taught, as a transaction concluded at a distance and reported to the beneficiary by letter.

An ordo salutis, an order of salvation, is a theologian's attempt to lay out the elements of God's saving work in a sequence, so that a student can see how they relate. The Latin phrase is an eighteenth-century Lutheran coinage, but the practice is older and the impulse behind it is not academic. If someone asks whether a person must be born again before they can believe, or whether God forgives before or after he changes the heart, they are asking an ordo question, and a teacher who has no answer will give an accidental one.

Take care with what the order claims. It is not a sequence in time. Nobody thinks a person spends a fortnight regenerate before being justified. It is an order of logical or causal dependence, an account of what rests on what. Berkhof's Reformed list runs: effectual calling, regeneration, conversion in faith and repentance, justification, adoption, sanctification, perseverance and glorification. An Arminian list keeps most of the same items and moves one, placing faith before regeneration, because on that account the new birth is what God does in a person who has believed rather than what produces the believing. That single swap is the whole Calvinist and Arminian argument of the previous lesson, expressed as a list. Lutheran dogmatics arrange things differently again, and one feature is worth noticing because it bears directly on this lesson: the older Lutheran manuals commonly place the mystical union after justification, as a consequence of it, where Calvin places union first and derives justification from it. A student who has been taught only one list will mistake it for the shape of the thing itself.

Now the criticism that has reshaped this discussion in the last fifty years, and it has been pressed hardest by Reformed writers about their own tradition's habit. The criticism is that union with Christ is not an item in the list at all. It is not a link in the chain but the reality the whole chain is describing. John Murray, in Redemption Accomplished and Applied in 1955, wrote that union with Christ is the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation, and Richard Gaffin developed the argument in his work on the resurrection, contending that in Paul the benefits are not a series of discrete gifts issued one after another but aspects of one gift, namely Christ himself, received whole. On this reading, to ask whether justification comes before sanctification is like asking whether a man's height comes before his weight. They are two true things about one person, distinguishable but not sequential, and both are true of him because he is who he is and not because one produced the other.

The argument for this has three strands worth stating. First, the texts locate the benefits in Christ rather than in a queue, as section 1 showed. Second, when Paul does give something like a sequence, at Romans 8:29-30, he is making a point about the certainty of God's purpose rather than teaching an order of causation, and he leaves out sanctification altogether, which is odd if the passage is a syllabus. Third, the pastoral effect of the chain model is that a believer is invited to audit their own progress along it, which is precisely the anxiety the next two lessons will have to deal with.

The objection to the argument is also real and should not be skipped. If union is the whole thing, the distinctions inside it can blur, and the distinction between justification and sanctification is the one the Reformation was least willing to lose. There is a genuine worry that a theology of participation slides towards making the believer's transformation the ground of their acceptance, which is the thing chapter 3 of this module is about. Defenders answer that union is exactly what keeps the two distinct, since within a union the two graces can be inseparable without being confused, and that this is Calvin's own reason for arranging things as he does. Which is where the next section starts.

Calvin opens book three of the Institutes with a problem, and it is a good one to put to any theology of the cross. He has spent book two describing everything Christ has done. Now he asks how any of it reaches us. His answer, at 3.1.1, is blunt: as long as Christ remains outside us and we are separated from him, everything he suffered and did for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us. The whole of book three, which contains his treatment of faith, repentance, justification and prayer, is therefore organised as an answer to a single question, how we come to be joined to Christ, and the answer is the secret working of the Spirit.

Out of that union, Calvin says, come two things at once, and he calls them the duplex gratia, the twofold grace. The first is that being reconciled to God through Christ's blamelessness we have in heaven a gracious Father instead of a judge. The second is that being sanctified by Christ's Spirit we cultivate blamelessness and purity of life. Justification and sanctification, in other words, are not two stages but two gifts of one Christ, received in one act of being joined to him. Calvin's image for their relation is the sun, whose light and heat cannot be separated though they are not the same thing, and his conclusion is that Christ justifies nobody whom he does not also sanctify, because Christ cannot be torn into pieces.

This has a specific polemical point and it is worth naming, because it tells you what the doctrine was built to do. Calvin is fighting on two fronts. Against those who said that a doctrine of free acceptance must produce loose living, he answers that the same union that justifies also sanctifies, so the objection assumes a division that cannot occur. Against Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran theologian who held that a believer is justified by the indwelling divine righteousness of Christ actually present in them, Calvin insists that the righteousness by which we are accepted is Christ's own and remains his, received by imputation, not a quality infused into us and then assessed. Notice that Calvin is therefore holding a participatory account and a forensic account together, and refusing to buy either with the other. Whether he succeeds is a fair question and a live one; what is not fair is to describe him as a purely forensic theologian, which requires not reading book three.

Recent scholarship has pressed the participatory side of Calvin harder, notably J. Todd Billings in Calvin, Participation, and the Gift in 2007, and there has been a corresponding argument among Reformed theologians about whether making union the organising category weakens the forensic clarity the tradition prizes. That argument is still running. What it has already established is that a flat opposition between a Western legal account of salvation and an Eastern participatory one does not survive contact with the sixteenth-century sources, which is the point the last section of this lesson has to take up.

Give this doctrine its own voice before comparing it to anything, because it is usually introduced to Western readers as an exotic alternative, which is both a discourtesy and a historical error. The Orthodox account begins where the New Testament puts it. 2 Peter 1:4 says, 'Through these He has given us His precious and magnificent promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, now that you have escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.' Note the two halves: a positive participation in God, and an escape from corruption, held in one sentence. To that the tradition joins John 17:21-23, where the Son prays that they may be one as he and the Father are one, and John 15:5, 'I am the vine and you are the branches. The one who remains in Me, and I in him, will bear much fruit. For apart from Me you can do nothing.'

The fathers state it as an exchange. Irenaeus, in the preface to the fifth book of Against Heresies, written around 180, says that Jesus Christ through his transcendent love became what we are, that he might bring us to be what he is himself. Athanasius, at the end of On the Incarnation, puts it in the sentence everyone quotes: he became man that we might become God. Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa work the same theme, and Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century develops it into a whole account of how a created will is healed rather than overridden. The Eastern claim is that the incarnation is not only a rescue operation but the means by which human nature is taken into the life of God, and that salvation is therefore described most exactly not as a change of legal standing but as a change of what a human being is becoming.

The obvious Western worry is that this makes creatures into gods, and the tradition answered it long before the question was put in English. Gregory Palamas, in the fourteenth century, defending the hesychast monks of Mount Athos, distinguished God's essence, which is utterly unknowable and unshareable, from God's energies, which are God himself in his activity towards creation and are genuinely communicated. Deification is participation in the energies, not in the essence. A council at Constantinople in 1351, the last of three that dealt with the controversy, upheld the distinction, and it has been settled Orthodox teaching since. So the doctrine does not say a Christian becomes a fourth person of the Godhead, or ceases to be a creature. It says a creature genuinely shares God's own life without ever becoming what God is. Vladimir Lossky's The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, published in 1944, is the book that put this in front of Western readers, and it remains the usual place to start.

Now the comparative question, honestly. How far do the Eastern and Western vocabularies describe the same thing? There are three answers in the field and each has real support. The first says the difference is largely one of idiom. Deification language is not absent from the West: Augustine preaches it, and Thomas Aquinas defines grace as a certain participated likeness of the divine nature, which is 2 Peter 1:4 turned into a definition; the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes Athanasius on the exchange in paragraph 460. On this account the West has the doctrine under other names, sanctification and adoption and glorification, and the East has the forensic material under other names, since Orthodox liturgy is full of pleas for mercy and forgiveness. The second answer says the difference is real and structural: the West, from Anselm forward, organised salvation around the question of guilt and satisfaction, and the East around the question of death and corruption, and those are different questions producing different systems, which is why justification is a chapter heading in one and barely a topic in the other. The third answer says the vocabularies have partly converged in the twentieth century and that the convergence is genuine but should not be overstated.

One episode makes the difficulty concrete and is worth knowing. From the 1970s a group of Finnish Luther scholars gathered around Tuomo Mannermaa, working in dialogue with the Russian Orthodox, argued that Luther's own account of justification is participatory in a way the later Lutheran confessions obscured. They read his formula that in faith itself Christ is present, from the 1535 Galatians commentary, as meaning a real union in which Christ himself, and not merely a verdict about him, is given to the believer, and they took this to be materially close to theosis. The argument is set out in English in Christ Present in Faith, published in 2005. It has been influential and it is contested: Lutheran critics, among them Robert Kolb and Charles Arand, reply that the Finnish reading imports a metaphysical framework foreign to Luther and blurs the distinction between the gift and the giver that the Reformation existed to protect. A student should know that this is an open scholarly dispute about what Luther meant, not a settled ecumenical result, and should notice what it shows either way: two traditions that were supposed to be describing incompatible things have each found the other's vocabulary in their own sources. Whether that is convergence or a trick of translation is exactly what is being argued about, and it is not this lesson's place to announce the winner.